I don’t know anyone who celebrated except maybe the shitstains at adobe who planted the timebomb in Flash Player. Though that was pretty short lived because people found a way around it, either out or necessity (in china) or because they wanted to keep using the Flash projector to play games on Desktop.
For anyone not aware of the workarounds it was likely pretty shitty for people who needed or want to use software that depends on Flash Player.
Of course now we have ruffle.rs but it still isn’t perfect, and there is still software that relies on unimplemented functions. Hopefully those get resolved soon.
There is a Flash-animated webcomic I read years ago that really excelled in the medium. Thank goodness for Ruffle, or it would be lost forever.
All the web developers I know did a little jig that day. YMMV
I only celebrated the downfall of flash because it was an insecure piece of shit software. It just happened to have people make a ton of fun and interesting content on it.
Funny that Club Penguin made it into the picture. It’s one of the earliest games I can remember that pushed subscriptions and micro transactions and was aimed heavily at young children.
Also, Adventure Quest had a subscription (not necessarily micro transactions) and the image for Bloons TD is, as far as I understand, from modern Bloons with micro transactions.
Relevant: Newgrounds Flash Forward Jam 2025
Edit: oops that was last year. Flash Forward 2026
I hate shit like this. Fym we celebrated it’s downfall?? Excuse you?? I was not happy about it.
Even more annoying is when some of those games were garbage but they ended up being turned into phone microtransaction hell or overpriced Steam games anyway.
Who? Who celebrated?
Everyone who had a laptop getting more than 20 mins life out of the battery, because flash would turn the CPU and fan up to 100. Of course there where also a lot of ads using flash on each website…
They got the corporate greed hit the exact same way as cellphone games. Pushed graphics and bloat too hard the, medium couldn’t handle it any more.
Who celebrated? Everyone at the time who wasn’t trying to write flash exploits did
We celebrated the downfall of Flash because every other week, some horrible vulnerability was found. And because of the ease of distribution in games, it was super easy to jack people’s computers.
What killed the prevalence of all these wonderful free games was developers’ ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
Plus those of us on Linux desktops didn’t love the workarounds we had to do with gnash or whatever. The rise of the mobile device cemented the need to have open web standards not tied to proprietary formats and proprietary software.
A bunch of the original flash games just got straight ported to Steam (or the various Apple/Google Play stores).
You can buy them for a few bucks and play them to your heart’s desire. Or find pirated copies and sideload them.
was developers’ ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
And Valve/Apple/Google getting a 30% kickback.
They are absolutely fine with all the garbage because it buys them many, many megayachts. Newgrounds, Kongregate, Addictivegames and all those flash websites did not get megayachts.
was developers’ ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
I don’t remember a single person being happy with Flash going away
I was happy.
Flash had a ton of vulnerabilities. It felt like one zero-day RCE per year.
Flash never had a good FOSS implementation until years after Flash Player was discontinued.
I was very happy about the death of Flash Player, but neutral on the death of the Flash format.
I didn’t celebrate per se, but Flash was incredibly insecure and HTML5 was good enough for most of these simple games and it came out in… 2008, so 13 years before Flash went EOL.
What I did celebrate was finding out that Ruffle is a thing and most of your old favourite Flash games websites use it now so you can play your old favourites again! It’s also open source and written in Rust so everything necessary to give the programmer nerd in me a boner.
I was a flash dev back then. People were very happy because of no more plugin need, no more badly scripted flash-ads that ate 100% cpu, etc.
Also Apple…
Nothing except for the use of Flash has changed… There are still tons of free to play games without MTX or other greedy bullshit made by passionate people, and just like back in the day, 90% of them are straight doodoo.
FFS, Newgrounds is still around and gets new stuff posted daily. Anon should leave 4chan and check out the rest of the internet.
Robot unicorn attack is a masterpiece.
Being reminded of it, 'had to go play it for the first time in years, just now.
We absolutely didn’t celebrate its downfall. Flash had issues, but the culture of flash games was awesome.
That said, indie games are way better these days
I was fucking about in Flash back when it was Macromedia Flash.
Yeah, a good many of us did not ‘celebrate’ its downfall… maybe we took it for granted, but that’s not the same thing.
Thankfully, NewGrounds is still up and operational.
It’s just hard to find the good games now since there are so many
That said, indie games are way better these days
They all seem to be the same boring stardew valley/dead cells/anyotherauccessfullindiegame clones with pretty pixelart and too much time e commitment needed
As if flash games weren’t 75% dressup games, tower defense, and shit platformers. We still got plenty of that slop don’t worry, we just have other kinds of slop to go with it.
I remember a horrible tower defence with dinos and ugly towers, maps and really strange upgrade designs. Rated one star on some old flash games website.
However absolute masterpieces like fancy pants man are forever good.
The game you are talking about is Age of War and is arguably one of the most well known and beloved flash games ever. It might just not have clicked with you but I have very fond memories of it and find it to be more enjoyable than most recent releases as you could just launch a game, play a bit and be done with it, no toxic mechanics, no forced wait, no super extensive (and kinda boring) content.
one of my favourite series out there is the submachine series (mysterious point and click thing), the rest of pastel games (Aurora was good but as of now it’s abandoned). i will add GARE sapphire mechs, really good game, raft wars and city siege. nitrome, some obscure game on municipio like fragger or ufo joe. pepsi pinball, chasm (a point and click gane), i’ll see what else i can find.
oh, sure, a kitty dream (nitrome jam game, by rayumi). bubble trouble,the flash player version of bubble bubble.
oh there’s more, bloxorz, morningstar (point and click, by red herring, also very cool), mishroom madness
There are lots of other games as well. Let me recommend a couple:
- What remains of Edith Finch
- A short hike
- Outer Wilds
- Disco Elysium
- Feather
- Gris
- Journey of the broken circle
- Sayonara Wild Hearts
- Untitled Goose Game
- a dark room
Your “couple” is a whole extended polycule
Some people just have more exciting … gaming lives.
Disco Elysium by itself is an extended polycule.
The polycule is a state of mind
Yeah there’s a lot of copycats, though even within that there’s some great stuff. My wife has been loving fields of mistria. But also I’m currently playing slay the spire 2 and loving it. You’ve got games like cult of the lamb, Rogue Legacy (1&2), every supergiant game, Cassette Beasts, and less well known ones like Song of the Deep. Flash games were their own thing and it was awesome, but with limited time for games these days I’d rather be playing modern indie games. But I understand why some people would feel the opposite
There was a lot of lazy copies with flash games too. And that’s not unique for indie games or even video games. Every form of media has people copying what’s already successful
Some of the best games are copies of earlier games that flopped, because they were poorly implemented or lacked good marketing or were just ahead of their time.
the time commitement bit is real.
They definitely skew to the pixel games and the rogue-likes, due to the limitations of a cell phone interface. But Idk if I’d call stardew valley boring.
I had a lot of fun with Slay the Spire and Balatro. There’s a bunch of indie board games that are on mobile as well, Root being one of my favorites. And then there’s all the digital CCGs (basically the only way I play MtG anymore is on mobile).
I would say the bigger problem with finding good indie games is the nightmarish volume of bad games (both indie and otherwise) that crowd out everything in the marketplace. I learn about the ones I like through word of mouth. Anything I just randomly install and fool around with, I inevitably hate.
Idk if I’d call stardew valley boring.
Oh stardew wasn’t (ok, the start of year one, maybe)
finding good indie games is the nightmarish volume of bad games (both indie and otherwise)
Yeah, that seems to be the issue. It became so easy to make games (and now even more with vibe-coding) that the market is flooded, often with clones.
:: looks around nervously as someone who loves those specific games::
Yeah, I love the clones, it’s like bonus levels
It never died though? The Devs just pivoted to different platforms. Itch, Newgrounds, and even the major app stores have endless content from indie devs.
Flash games were just never mainstream enough. And let’s not forget that the most popular flash games were those shitty FB games, like FarmVille and Candy Crush, or that the shitty mobile games all started off as clones/ports of already popular flash games, like Angry Birds/Crush the Castle.
I tried to become a flash developer back then 😞
Donko Donko Literate Club
However, consider: if Flash was still popular, by this point Adobe would have enshittified it to hell and back to milk its customers. It would no longer be the thing you miss.
Thry would probably jack up the license fee for devs, force everyone to use a shitty app store and when enough users are on the app store, start charging to use the app store.
If I remember correctly flash was never cheap, everyone just bootlegged it.
